Biased and unprofessional reports on German books, translation issues and life in Berlin

Tuesday, 1 February 2011

Schlegel Tieck Prize to Breon Mitchell

Huzzah! The British Schlegel-Tieck Prize for translation from the German goes to the esteemed Breon Mitchell for his new version of Günter Grass's The Tin Drum.

I had the honour of fawning over Breon Mitchell in person the summer before last, when he read from this very translation in Berlin. So I know that a) he's completely charming, b) his translation is amazing and c) he does a great deal to support other translators and raise the profile of the profession as a whole.

The book also recently earned him the American Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize.

Read more about this year's TLS/Translators Association prizes in the TLS. Including a brief passage about Breon's work:

As Mitchell says, he has “sometimes placed the sound and rhythm of a sentence above normal syntax and grammar”, while honouring a “syntactic complexity that stretches language”.